Employers Behaving Badly

In this week's news roundup: Two large employers announce a drastic change to their employee benefits plans, a rural hospital CEO is sentenced in a stalking case, and the results of a compensation survey fail to wow anyone.

If you're tired of preaching to your employees that they should work out, here's an alternative strategy for reducing healthcare costs: Cover fewer people. One way to do that is to stop extending benefits to spouses who can obtain coverage on their own.

Last week, United Parcel Service and the University of Virginia both announced they will stop covering employees' spouses on their healthcare benefits policies if the spouse is able to obtain insurance through his or her own employer. Both companies blamed rising medical costs and the healthcare reform law for this change.

UPS announced its new policy in a memo obtained by Kaiser Health News [PDF], which stated that while 33,000 spouses have health insurance coverage through UPS, approximately 15,000 could obtain coverage through their own employer. The University of Virginia is dropping employee spouses from its benefits plans for the same reason. Like UPS, this change will only affect spouses who can obtain coverage through their own employer.

The reaction to rising costs by these two large employers is a shift from tactics where large employers have simply applied higher premiums to employees who wish to keep their spouses covered.

Although the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was built on the promise to insure more Americans, the source of that insurance coverage appears to be shifting. Look for more announcements along these lines as employers crunch the numbers going into open enrollment season.

Hospital CEO spies on physician
The NSA isn't the only body hacking into phone calls and emails.

In Idaho, the CEO of Bingham Memorial Hospital, Louis Kraml, submitted a guilty plea in response to misdemeanor charges of stalking in the second degree, the state attorney general's office says.

Along with a group of the hospital's IT staff, the Kraml was originally indicted on a federal charge by a grand jury for illegally intercepting and recording phone calls from June 2009 to August 2010 between one of the hospital's former physicians and his staff.

The information came to the surface as a result of an 18-month, $500,000 investigation paid for by the hospital's board, which was investigating a series of allegations about inappropriate conduct at the hospital.

According to the summary of the hospital's internal review, a legal firm was investigating allegations that "BMH secretly monitored and recorded telephone conversations to and from a BMH doctor's office for a few weeks during 2010."

Employees reported that phones were set up in an on-site basement to monitor the physician's telephone calls. "Former IT employees confirmed they set up phones to record telephone conversations of a BMH doctor and his staff," reads the report. "Several individuals stated that, in their opinion, the former IT Director received direction to set up the phones from upper management at BMH."

No recordings have surfaced, but the report says the former IT director delivered the recordings to hospital administration, who deny ever receiving them.

The Idaho attorney general amended the grand jury's original charges to a misdemeanor, and Kraml entered a plea of guilty, the AG's office said in a statement. The CEO was fined $1,000 and has been sentenced to probation and 100 hours of community service. Two of the IT employees were presumed innocent on the grounds they were acting on instructions from their superiors. One IT employee has a warrant for his arrest as he never showed up in court.

According to The Teton Valley News, the hospital board plans to hire an ethics officer to proactively plan against future issues, and no one is to be fired or reprimanded. The hospital spokesperson said policies will be more closely "refined."

Healthcare wellness professionals' pay doesn't impress
Don't blame fat HR compensation packages in the healthcare sector for the rising cost of benefits. In healthcare, wellness and benefits professionals make just below the cross-industry average of $50,000.

In May 2012, the nonprofit Wellness Council of America (WELCOA) electronically surveyed more than 800 human resource professionals. The WELCOA National Wellness Compensation Survey may be the first compensation survey conducted across the industries to compare compensation metrics, as well as sentiments in this field around salary.

From benefits managers to employee assistance professionals, this survey compares the median salaries across industries for each of the positions.

The majority of respondents felt their salaries were consistent with others in their field, which includes safety, risk management, wellness, human resources, benefits, occupational health, and employee assistance. Wellness professionals ($55,000) and wellness coaches ($41,000) specifically earn the lowest median salaries, while employee assistance professionals ($75,000) and program directors ($70,000) earn the highest.

Most health and wellness professionals are "moderately satisfied" with their yearly earnings. Nearly two-thirds said they hope to make between $51,000 and $90,000 in the next five years.

Although they earn more than government employees, healthcare wellness professionals earn less than other large private industries like real estate, finance, manufacturing, and transportation. The highest median income for wellness and benefits professionals was in professional/scientific/technical industry, whose human resources employees earn a median salary of $80,000.